Anatomy of a hit

Just 11 days to go for the release of Salman Rushdie's memoirs. Here's an essay I wrote about his most popular work of fiction during my stint at Columbia Journalism School. 

In the summer of 1981, Salman Rushdie delivered a lecture at the India International Centre in New Delhi. The crowd grew so “unexpectedly large that it had spilled out under the trees and loudspeakers had to be set up to broadcast his voice, a voice that everyone present recognized instantly as being the voice of a new age: strong, original and demanding of attention,” recalls Anita Desai in her introduction to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

            Rushdie’s second novel is an arresting allegory for independent India that’s narrated through the life of Saleem Sinai, who was born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 – just like his country. He’s endowed with a strong sense of smell, a dripping nose and the ability to teleport himself to wars.

Midnight’s Children is considered the first “Indian” novel because it examined India as a whole rather than being rooted in a particular region.  It gave confidence to future Indian writers that they could write about their country in an English that’s distinctly Indian. It showed publishers in the West that books by Indian writers can be commercial successes. Thirty-one years later, the filmmaker Deepa Mehta is adapting the flamboyant novel into a movie that’s scheduled to release in December this year.

The novel attracted laudatory reviews and commercial success in India when it was published. “It is, in fictional terms, one of the most ferocious indictments of India’s evolution since Independence,” wrote Sunil Sethi in the India Today magazine in 1981. “Salman Rushdie, as a novelist, has chosen his weapons of crucifixion, as few journalists, analysts, soothsayers or historians have or possibly can.” By 1984, the book had sold 4,000 hardback copies and 45,000 paperback editions - substantial figures for an infant publishing industry.

Midnight’s Children closed the Anglicized chapter of Indian writing in English. Rushdie’s predecessors like GV Desani and Mulk Raj Anand depended on Western sensibilities for their success. Desani’s 1948 book All About Mad Hatter was the story of an Anglo-Malay man in search of enlightenment. It created a stir in the literary salons of London rather than the sedate bookstores of India while Anand’s work explored the themes of untouchability. The English poet Anthony Burgess wrote the preface to All About Mad Hatter while EM Forster wrote one for Anand’s book, Untouchables.

The pages of Midnight’s Children opened readers to themes that were never before written about, only experienced. Partition, marginality, abuse of political power and being a Muslim in India bind the pages and the boisterous generations of Saleem Sinai’s family. In doing so, Midnight’s Children followed the path of European and Latin American post-modern literature that mirrored a nation’s progress, in works by such authors as  Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Its success gave a future generation of Indian writers like Mukul Kesavan and Aravind Adiga the confidence to write ambitious novels about India. Kesavan’s 1995 book, Looking Through Glass, is an odyssey through an India gets divided along sectarian lines en route to Independence. Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, touched on themes endemic in contemporary urban Indian discourse: corruption, Hindu-Muslim tensions and an economic rivalry with China.

A contentious element of Midnight’s Children is its prose. Rushdie uses translations of Indian idioms and Bollywood lyrics to make the novel accessible to a wider readership. “His real focus was on Indians speaking in English,” said Amardeep Singh, a professor of Indian literature at LeHigh University. “He showed the world that the language belongs as much to India as it does to the United States and the United Kingdom.” Some critics believe that this was Rushdie’s attempt to make the book appealing to a Western audience. Rushdie himself claimed that he never had an audience in mind for the book. “I didn’t conceive of an ideal reader except perhaps myself,” he said in an interview with the India Today magazine in 1981. “I was trying primarily to write the kind of book about India I would like to read.”

The India of Midnight’s Children was churned in a cauldron fired by the forces of economic liberalization. It gave birth to a new India whose global ambitions and darker realities are now explained by writers like Suketu Mehta, Aravind Adiga and Sonia Faleiro. Their work seems closer to the phrase ‘Indian writing in English’ than Midnight’s Children. “When I teach Indian literature, Midnight’s Children is a tough sell to my students,” said Singh. “They find it hard to accept the novel as Indian. On the other hand, when I mention Suketu Mehta’s book, their jaws drop.” It is important to distinguish that Midnight’s Children is a novel whereas Mehta’s book, Maximum City, is a riveting memoir about contemporary Bombay. Rushdie uses fantasy and magic realism to tell an allegorical story. Mehta, on the other hand, explains how the city of his birth has changed over time.

 One reason why “Indian writing in English” has come to seem antonymous to Midnight’s Children is the novel’s central theme: partition. In the 31 years since its publication, India has seen the birth of a new generation to which Singh’s students belong. They never experienced the trauma of 1947 nor the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s political power. The only bridge that lessens the gulf between these Midnight’s Grandchildren and those years are history books. Another reason why these students disconnect India from Midnight’s Children is India itself. In his novel, India experiences authoritarian rule and fights full-scale wars with Pakistan. The book portrays Indira Gandhi as the root cause of all that plagues democracy in India and suggests that her departure will ensure the country’s progress. Instead, we’ve made more peace with our neighbor than wars and never experienced authoritarian rule. Indira is no longer alive but her departure hasn’t reduced India’s deep social, political, sectarian and regional fissures.

Midnight’s Children, however, set a frame for a future generation of Indian writers who chronicled the chasms of India in their fiction and non-fiction works. Be it Kesavan or Adiga, Faleiro or Mehta, they all write for India and of India. Their works condition the English language to Indian sensibilities and reflect their own experience with the country. Back in 1981, the novelist Clark Blaise wrote “Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.” The last 31 years have proved him right.

The Free Speech Campaign

Nilanjana Roy, the redoubtable writer and journalist, has started a campaign to protect and reinforce a fundamental right. The idea is to do a bunch of readings on February 14 (the day when Satanic Verses was banned in 1989) to protest book bans and censorship in the arts. The campaign page suggests that you should organize a public reading (or take part in one) at 3 PM in whichever city you are. If you have a blog, post this poem by Rabindranath Tagore: just like I did.

"We cannot let our republic, our beloved republic, our constitutional republic, our free and free-speaking republic, be hijacked by fear. It happened once in the Emergency. It must never happen again.
We cannot let them close our mouths and eyes and ears.
We cannot let them break the pen or ration the ink. ~ Vikram Seth, speech at the Kolkata Book Fair.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high 
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth…
Where the mind is led forward by thee 
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. 

~ Rabindranath Tagore.


(The poster below was designed by Sanjay Sipahimalani. Check out more on his site.)

Erudite escorts

Sorry for the silence, guys. Work, work and more work has ensured that I only write for the magazine and not for the blog. This, I assure you, will change in the coming months. For now, enjoy this short Q&A I did with Chandrahas Choudhury on his new book, India: A Traveller's Literary Companion.

In a new anthology, Chandrahas Choudhury has compiled 13 works of fiction set in different parts of the country to portray a theatrical version of India. He has included pieces by writers as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Kunal Basu and Qurratulain Hyder. In an email interview, Choudhury explains why he chose the smooth world of fiction to describe the turbulence of reality. Are these stories meant to highlight the underbelly of India to audiences that have been enamoured by the “‘great India story?” I did want the book to provide the greatest possible diversity of viewpoints. That’s why literature in English is balanced with literature in translation from several languages, and older Indian writers with newer ones. I’d say that the stories cumulatively reveal both the strengths of India – the complexity of its history, the many layers that make for personal identity in India, the liberatory potential of Indian democracy – and its flaws and stresses, such as the ubiquity of hierarchical thinking and the pervasive suspicion and misrepresentation of the “other”. I didn’t want a formulaic or shallow picture of India to emerge from my selections, especially when the idea of the book was to highlight the particularity and density of “the local”.  How did you select these pieces?  Well, I had all of modern Indian literature to choose from, because the concept of the book was “stories that engage powerfully with place”. Now place is integral to the human sense of self, to our awareness of history, to our dreams – and therefore to storytelling. This meant that the scope of the book was vast. So in a way I was being paid to teach myself a lot more about Indian literature than I did when I was offered the editorship of the book. Many older Indian writers, from the first half of the twentieth century, haven’t really got their due in English – Fakir Mohan Senapati and Phanishwarnath Renu, for example – so I was keen to include them. Why didn’t you include any non-fiction in this anthology? The idea of the anthology, and indeed of the entire series of traveller’s literary companions to different countries, was that it was all going to be fiction. There are lots of non-fictional guides and introductions to India anyway. And in moving between character, society, and landscape, all the while telling a story, fiction offers an intensity and depth of representation that most reportage cannot achieve. Why aren't any of your pieces in the book? Well, usually as an editor of a book it's not considered good form to select your own work. And there was so much good writing to choose from – about a hundred years worth of modern Indian fiction – that it wouldn't have been right to put my own writing into the book. At the same time, I did feel ambitious for the little bit of the book that did feature my own writing – the introduction, and the notes to each story – so I threw myself into making these bits as vivid as possible. The stories in this anthology reflect the political turmoil of the region they're set in… Literature can't but help address questions of politics, social injustice, gender and history. These issues always come up in the telling of stories. Obviously I did want the stories I chose to be a complex as possible, so that they both fulfilled the demands of the theme of the book but also transcended it. I just chose the stories I loved best.

A prince among men

Really enjoyed writing this piece since I got opportunity to meet Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma and the author of Dara Shukoh: A Play in Verse to talk about his book. It's a beautifully written volume which looks at the clash between pluralism and orthodoxy through the life of Dara Shukoh, the doomed, younger brother of Aurangzeb. Although my chat with Mr Gandhi lasted about 15 mins, it was one of the most enjoyable meetings in a long time. Read on:

At a point in Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s play Dara Shukoh, Mir Jumla, a staunch ally of the Mughal prince Aurangzeb, camps on the outskirts of Delhi. It is night time, and Jumla is dictating a letter to the prince when he is interrupted. A soldier enters his tent, informing Jumla that he has arrested a family that forced its 12-year-old daughter-in-law to commit sati. Jumla admonishes the soldier, saying “Law is law, custom custom/Therefore, their decrees cannot overlap/We uphold the former, Leave convention for some bold reformer.” His casual dismissal resonates with the Khap panchayat horror that still consumes Delhi’s hinterland, precisely where Jumla might have been camped three centuries ago.

“Very often the combination of orthodoxy and male chauvinism has wreaked havoc in India,” said Gandhi, considering the allegory. A long-time critic of India’s social violence, Gandhi powerfully channels the struggle against religious and social orthodoxy in the play, which was reissued in paperback last month. Gandhi, the former governor of West Bengal, is a prolific writer of history and translated Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy into Hindustani. In Dara Shukoh, he uses rhyming medleys – inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s 1892 play Akbar’s Dream and John Dryden’s 1675 Restoration Drama Aurengzebe –to tell the story of the famously enlightened Mughal prince, who despite being his father Shah Jehan’s choice as emperor, was overthrown by his conservative brother Aurangzeb in a bitter war of succession.

While the history is riveting, Gandhi uses the saga to illustrate a contemporary struggly between religious tolerance and conservatism that still blights sections of society today. “I didn’t take him [Dara] out of the context of history,” he said. “He was, to me, a figure in history who lent himself to dramatic presentation without any embellishments.” Of course, as with most tragic heroes, Dara’s character contained a fatal flaw – in this case an overly trusting nature. He was not built to slay his own flesh and blood, and bemused by how easily his brother turned him and their father in the pursuit of power. “From all I’ve been able to understand, Shukoh was a very trusting man to the point of being gullible”, said Gandhi. “His reactions to the intrigues of court were reactions of a trusting man who was bewildered by the betrayal of trust.” His gullibility was matched by severe anger-management problems, which Gandhi does not fail to present, as in the third act when Dara reacts to news of his brother Shuja’s rebellion: “Shuja you malignant tumour/ Cyst of a rumour/ Suppurating excess/ In pig’s recess.”

Yet for all its rage and betrayal, Dara Shukoh is a play counterbalanced with optimism. For the writer, Dara’s story is less a tragedy than a “triumph of tragedy”. The prince has proved an enduring and popular figure in Indian history, a sort of icon for tolerance, Gandhi said. “In India, it is the illiberal who are on the margins but are more vocal. The centre-stage is still extremely tolerant which is why people respond to Dara Shukoh in the way they do.” This response has had traction elsewhere in South Asian literature. In his 2000 novel Moth Smoke, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid uses the prince’s trial as an allegory for the state of Pakistan during the 1998 nuclear tests.

Perhaps appropriately, Dara has received few of the grand memorials that go to men of power. It’s doubtful the visitors who course through Humayan’s tomb every weekend realise that the prince lies buried in an unmarked grave there. Unlike his father and brother, no roads in New Delhi were named after the Sufi prince. But it may be that Dara secured a greater seat than the one that was captured by his brother, Gandhi said. “Aurangzeb ascended the throne but Dara Shukoh was already enthroned in the hearts of the people.”


This piece first appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Book Review: Nomad

It takes nerves of steel for a Muslim woman from Somalia to escape a bad marriage, to lie to get refugee status in the Netherlands and then migrate to post- 9/11 America. But it takes more than just steely nerves to write two books – Infidel and Nomad – which are a scathing condemnation of conservative Muslim society. In Infidel, Ali exposed the world to her harrowing personal journey. In Nomad, the former Dutch MP writes about how orthodox Islam devastates the lives of its followers.

Hirsi Ali’s memoir-manifesto is about the journey of a Muslim woman cross-countrying Somalia, Holland and America. But it’s the people she encounters during the journey – family, politicians, college students – and the manner in which Islam has dictated their life choices which provides her fodder for her indictment of the religion. The anger in her writing stems from her family’s obsession with the Quranic dictat. In one passage Ali describes how, when she fell ill as a kid, her mother spent all her time praying for her recovery instead of giving her medicines. She blames the illnesses of her depressed half-brother and AIDS-stricken sister on her father’s polygamy, and laments the fact that her half-sister Sahra chose to marry in her early twenties in accordance with her family’s wishes.

As Nomad’s narrative races ahead, Ali makes provocative points that are bound to polarise the opinions of both Islamists and Islamophobes (both of whom have made the error of treating conservative Somalian society as a generalisation for Muslim life). She minces no words in writing that she supported the war on Iraq as an MP, and that she believes the political and legal infrastructure imported by European colonisers to Muslim countries improved the situation of women there. Ali demands that Muslim immigrants to America not stunt their children’s growth by keeping them “culturally illiterate”. These blunt arguments are anything but politically correct, but they draw on a lived experience that makes them impossible to dismiss.


A version of this review appeared in the TimeOut Delhi magazine.

Cheap Thrills

Sorry for the long silence but things have been quite hectic at work, as a result of which the blog writing has suffered. Did this piece - a sharp, slightly provocative critique of vernacular pulp fiction in India - for TimeOut Delhi. Read on.

Nadia is a bad girl. In Rajesh Kumar’s Hello Good Dead Morning, she is a young, sexually aroused woman who must douse “the fire burning in her body” after watching a blue film. So she seduces Nirmalkumar, the AC technician, then turns around and accuses him of rape. Ultimately, however, it is Nadia who is raped and filmed after receiving a “sex-inducing injection so that her senses are aroused to every male hand that touches her”. And another loose female receives her comeuppance in the world of Indian pulp.

India’s vernacular pulp fiction has shimmied back into the limelight with the recent release of The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction – Volume 2. The first volume, also translated by Pritham Chakravarty, caught fire in the literary salons of metropolitan India when it came out in 2008. It was the instant conversation-piece in Delhi/Mumbai/Bangalore bars, the ideal cool gift for anyone with a sense of irony. Blaft’s anthology rose to become the cigar-chewing don of a pack of translated and pulp-inspired creations, from the translated fiction of Surender Mohan Pathak to the grinding, tectonic body-mass of cartoon porn goddess Savita Bhabhi on the web.

Pulp – cheap thrills printed on cheap paper – has always referred to risqué or violent fiction to be read on train journeys (it’s easiest to find at railway platforms) or in the bathroom. It is popular culture in its truest form, and stays popular by offering sheer entertainment and the simple reaffirmation of conservative values. But now the new wave of Indian pulp is being devoured by the kind of Indian reader who would, in the same breath, dismiss a John Irving novel as middle-brow. Nobody is objecting to the prose, as mediocre and melodramatic as ever. Nobody is troubled by the fate of loose woman. Come on, man – it’s hilarious, they say. Even translator Pritham Chakravarthy, who worked on both the anthologies, agreed and said that pulp is “positively sexist”. But the purpose of the genre is to make people derive “vicarious pleasure” from these stories, she said.

Our new enthusiasm for pulp could spring from the fact that Indian writing in English has long failed to produce books which were written simply to entertain. “I’d like to use the joker’s dialogue from Batman: why so serious?” said book critic Nilanjana Roy. “For 30 years, Indian writing in English lacked books which were meant to be read just for pleasure and entertainment and pulp fiction – whether in English or in translation – has been filling that gap.” But the fact that it’s popular doesn’t mean anyone is mistaking it for quality literature, she says. “It’s like saying that Chetan Bhagat’s popularity makes him India’s greatest literary writer – one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.”

Roy noted that pulp and literary fiction both look at the same issues affecting society, though through different lenses. “The first volume of [the Blaft anthology], for instance, gives an insight into the role of women in Tamil society at that time,” she said.

However, Roy is wary of how easy it is to “fetishise” pulp fiction, pointing to the adulation it has received in the media. She likens the new pulp fiction to the kitschy design products such as tote bags emblazoned with Bollywood poster icons. “These products were staples of our households at one time and are now being sold back to us with a wink,” she said.

Shruti Ravindran, a Delhi-based journalist and fan of pulp fiction, is the kind of reader who discovered vernacular pulp after its “glossification”. Though she finds it “jarring to see retrograde sexual politics reproduced in shiny paperback form”, Ravindran attributed her enthusiasm for pulp fiction to “nostalgia for the world lost to our childhoods and youth and its [the fiction’s] perceived innocence”.

Reading these stories ironically, of course, is merely an excuse for metropolitan readers to avoid engaging seriously with the stories. “Irony is a deflection of critical awareness,” Ravindran said. “But as we’re unaware of the cultural background of the original readers, we don’t know whether they read it sceptically, or alongside feminist poetry.”

Maybe their favourite character was actually Karate Kavitha. Kavitha is always being captured by villains and having her clothes ripped off, but always comes back to kick their asses (“Amma! I’m dying!” they yelp) and save the day.

Going coastal with Samanth Subramanian

Did this for Timeout Delhi

Journalist Samanth Subramanian’s travelogue Following Fish does a circuit of India’s coastline, exploring the history, habits and environmental concerns of the country’s fishing communities. Three chapters of Following Fish – written from Bengal, Kerala and Mangalore – are dedicated to the eating of fish. Subramaniam talks about gods, gravies and why he thinks that “if Bengali cuisine was Wimbledon, the Hilsa will always play on Centre Court”.

Of all the elements in India’s coastline, why did you choose to place fish at the heart of your book?

Fish comes very naturally at the heart of life on the coast, particularly if you’re living on the extreme edges of it. The traditional fishing communities have it not only at the heart of their diet but also their profession, and in a sense their religion, because their profession is or was often influenced by religion. They would pray to get a good catch, so their culture is influenced by that to a large extent. It turned out to be the most natural link if you’re looking at the Indian coast.

What is it about hilsa, and other fish, that Bengalis make it their culinary obsession?

I think it’s just because they get damn good fish! For a long, long time, Bengal got the best fish in India. 

As a result, it was woven very, very strongly into their rituals and their culture. The ilish is a special fish in the sense that it’s seasonal, or rather it was seasonal and had an elusive quality to it. Also, its various textures and its strong flavor make it quite unlike any other. It’s enormously complexly constructed, too, and it really is an acquired taste. Bengalis have this superiority complex about ilish; they think that, since it’s their fish, only they can eat it well and appreciate it.

Curry seems to be integral to the dishes you ate. Did you deliberately choose curry-based dishes or do they reflect a common preference across the coastal regions?

The method of preparing fish by curry is, surprisingly, very common across the coastline of India. Gravy-based dishes became very common as you travelled down south, where the cuisine tends to get a lot more liquidy. It was not a conscious decision on my part but I guess it comes up a lot when you eat your way across the coast of India.

What sort of alcohol did you discover goes best with a coastal fish dish?

The most obvious answer has to be toddy in Kerala. If you get a good fish dish and some toddy in a “shaaap”, you could just sit there for hours; it’ll be nightfall before you know it. And if you go in the morning or early afternoon, the toddy is very sweet, almost like buttermilk with an acidic taste to it. The fish is kind of fresh too so if you go to a good shaaap, they will fry it well for you. So you can just sit there and enjoy the two…it’s a mind-blowing combination!

Quick note

Sorry for the intermittent silence; much has happened over the past two weeks on the work front, which is why I haven't been reading much. Suffice to say that I'm gainfully employed now and am settling into the new workplace. 


Will be doing a bit of reading over the weekend for a work related assignment and post an author interview in due course. In the meanwhile, enjoy the archives and do grab a copy of Samanth Subramanian's wonderful collection of travel essays, 'Following Fish'. 

Musings on Soumya Bhattacharya's 'You Must Like Cricket'

One of my many grouses about the mainstream media (and, to a lesser extent, Indian literature) is that it is devoid of quality memoir writing; particularly essays on personal experiences about cricket. Thanks to the advent and spread of TV and the internet, my guess is that cricket buffs would watch a riveting game of cricket rather than read stimulating and enjoyable memoirs about the game. Not only has that lead to the near-death of cricket writing, but, I reckon, made the experience of being a cricket buff distant and sterile. I am no exception; the first and last time I saw a game of cricket was in 1998 when India played Pakistan in Delhi and Kumble took 10 wickets in an innings. 

So on a balmy Saturday morning, I was delighted to find in the mail, Soumya Bhattacharya’s excellent cricket book You Must Like Cricket? Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan. It’s a book I’ve been keen on reading since I’ve read it’s (sort-of) sequel All That You Must Leave Behind and interviewed Soumya about it.

Essentially, You Must Like Cricket is about Soumya’s 30-year obsession with the gentleman’s game; nearly everything he does, experiences, thinks or observes has to do with the game of cricket. And, sometimes, this obsession makes him do slightly strange things. For instance, the book informs us, that after a getting sloshed during a junkette in Mauritius, Soumya went up to Kapil Dev and asked whether he could “touch the hand that had bowled the best outswinger in the history of Indian cricket”. On another occasion, he bought an air ticket from London to Calcutta just so that he could watch the final match of a tournament at the Eden Gardens. And, when asked by friends about the year of his daughter’s birth, Soumya nonchalantly replied ‘the same in which Laxman scored a historic double ton against the Aussies in Calcutta’.

These humorous vignettes aside, You Must Like Cricket is a quirky, irreverent and poignant account of the evolution of cricket as seen through the eyes of an enthusiastic cricket fan. Most importantly it gives words to those thoughts and emotions which get drowned under victorious cries of “Indi-yaaaaaahhhhh” and cuss-filled rants which evoke the misery of defeat. You Must Like Cricket, therefore, is a book which wants you to enjoy a fan’s experiences of the game as much as you enjoy the game itself.

Hence, what you’ll come across in this vivid, conversational memoir are not gushing accounts of historic victories but about how strong the memory of that victory is. Nor are there long winding essays on the shabbiness of some of our cricket grounds; instead, there’s poignant account about food and the importance of sharing it with fellow members of the audience. Most importantly, even though this a book of memories, cricket never seems to be on the periphery in this book, nor, I suspect, in Soumya’s life (possible, to the chagrin of his wife). Such is the writer’s craft that he places the sport as the skeleton and his memories of it as the flesh and blood of this book.

Since this is a collection of essays, I’m sure some of you are bound to ask about a favorite (or two). But, to be honest, I have none. After all, how can you say that one memory is better than another? That you enjoyed watching Sachin score a match-winning blistering century in Sharjah than a century at, say, Wankhede. Just like the sport which it reminisces about, You Must Like Cricket is best enjoyed as a whole and not in parts.

To be frank, You Must Like Cricket, has left me, well, stumped. For, as I wrote earlier, Soumya Bhattacharya has managed to give drowned emotions and thoughts words, sentences and paragraphs. He has written about India’s (and his) beloved sport with sparse prose and without being voluble or verbose (can any of you describe an innings or a memorable cricket win without using an adverb or an adjective? I bet not). Most importantly, he’s made the experience of cricket loving writable in an era which has seen the decline of cricket writing. That alone is reason enough to read this book.

Hence, I’m going back to re-read it and I suggest you do the same. At least once.

In Conversation with Fatima Bhutto

A brief chat with Fatima Bhutto on her new book Songs of Blood and Sword.

It’s coincidental that we meet on a day which also happens to be your grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s 31^st death anniversary. How has Pakistani politics evolved over the last three decades?

Well I wasn’t alive for all those 31 years but with his death – his murder actually – a very dangerous precedent was set. The first democratically elected leader of the country, who was truly committed to socialist principles put to death which sends the message that when we disagree with our political leaders, we don’t entrust the people to vote them out.

Any country, over a 31 year period, goes through tremendous shifts and changes but in Pakistan what we see is that problems like corruption are allowed to continue; the people are not given an agency that they deserve in a participatory system

In the book you write very glowingly of your grandfather but a lot of people in India and elsewhere would like to believe that he was more dictatorial than his predecessors. How would you react to that?

First of all, I didn’t write glowingly about him. I wrote very critically of Balochistan and of the powers he increased for himself towards the end. But I think the assumption that he was more dictatorial than his predecessors was totally unfounded because his predecessors did not come into power on a one-man-one-vote ballot. They didn’t even abide by the Constitution let alone pen a Constitution. His predecessors followed the dictates of America and the Soviet Union rather than engage in foreign relations with Asian and African countries. Certainly, he made mistakes like we saw Mujib in Bangladesh and Indira Gandhi did.

Also, if one looks at Pakistani history, certainly there hasn’t been that sort of freedom in terms of the right to vote, right to a constitution etc. All these things are now identified with the repression in Pakistan like the Hudood laws, the blasphemy laws etc which came after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

In recent interviews you’ve been called ‘the other Bhutto’, ‘the lonely Bhutto and ‘Benazir’s niece’. Have you ever felt that your individual identity as a writer has been overshadowed by your surname?

No. It’s a very South Asian thing to bio-data everybody; even on the book cover you see it written. And I have to say, this phrase ‘the other Bhutto’, I’ve only heard it in India. This book, obviously, is a very big book and a book on an important family..

But even when your previous book, 8.50 a.m. 8 October 2005, came out you were referred to as Benazir Bhutto’s niece…

And it’s very strange; it’s way for people to connect something which I completely understand. In countries like ours, which are so dominated by life figures, it’s easier for people to say ‘oh this person comes from so and so family’ when in fact, neither my family nor I had anything to do with the earthquake relief work. It is a very strange thing because for two years I wrote very critically of the Musharraf regime; at that point it wasn’t Benazir Bhutto’s niece. It was only when my aunt returned to Pakistan and I spoke about her it became ‘oh look, the criticism is coming from inside’. I was in Hong Kong for a literary festival and I remember being introduced as being the granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, niece of Benazir Bhutto etc… And I said, you know these things have their place but when it is referred to as a profession, then we’re losing sight of things slightly because as South Asians we do have multiple identities. Yes, I am all of these things but it feels very restrictive to be told ‘you are only this’. I for a woman in a South Asian country, you are always someone’s something. It takes a while to break out on your own. But I’m not worried about it; it (being labelled as Benazir’s niece etc.) doesn’t affect me.

You spoke about South Asian countries, which have a long history with dynasties. Is there a problem with our political systems that we throw up dynasties? Do you think these systems need to be re-examined?

Well I think if we look at this region, we also have to remember that for hundreds of years we ruled by foreign powers and when they left, they didn’t do so willingly; they left begrudgingly and left incredible cleavages in our country. I don’t think there’s any mistake that in all the countries the British left – Greece and Turkey, Palestine, the Irish – they left us with really fractured senses of self. And not just that but the way they ruled when they were here was really vile; by pitting people against each other, by strengthening education systems in one part and neglecting the other. For me, the main issue with dynasty is that it negates participation. And the British, if nothing else, were famous for not encouraging participation.

I think it’s one of the tremors they left us with. I think it was their refusal to deal with the country as a whole; it was their tendency to create factions that leaves not only Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, but Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma and Bhutan all with these ridiculous dynastic systems that otherwise we wouldn’t have had. I think, unfortunately – and this is probably an unpleasant thing to say – we still have this complex when it comes to Britain and America and our countries. We still have these ridiculous sort of histories told through foreigners’ eyes. The best sort of writing on Pakistan is by Tariq Ali and on India by Khushwant Singh. It’s not people who parachute themselves and explain our countries to us. Certainly, we don’t go to England and write their histories for them; I think colonialism has a lot to answer for and dynasty is one of them

Most reviews in the Indian press say that your book is a partisan account. In fact, one reviewer went to the extent of saying that you’re being ‘vengeful’. How do you react to such statements?

There’s not a drop of vengeance; this is a search for justice. There is no calling for violence; there is no calling for revenge. My father’s murder is reconstructed through the eyes of survivors, witnesses, police officers and judges. So anybody with the faculties to read can open up the footnote section and see it. And I would ask those critics what is vengeful? And I would ask them to find me a part that is vengeful. I don’t believe in vengeance as a human being. And in terms of partisan, I am a Bhutto and I’m writing about the Bhuttos so I will be partisan.  What does objective mean? There is no such thing as objective history because we are writing about countries we know, we live in, we’ve experienced. So the idea that it is partisan is not pretended – it is very clear here on the cover. There are the people who killed and I’m writing about them, I love them. As objective as I can be, I am. In fact, the opposite is said of me in Pakistan; ‘you’re too critical of your family, why are you being disloyal’. So I hope that at the end of the day, critics who read the book, read it and see that there are sources and they can double check. This is ultimately a labour of love and there is no call for blood in this book.

After the death of your grandfather, your father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto moved to Kabul and travelled frequently to Damascus and Libya. Do you think that if he remained in Pakistan, he could’ve been the political heir to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rather than Benazir?

I don’t think it was possible because the two sons (Mir and Shahnawaz Bhutto) were sent out because Zulfikar believed there was a threat against them and he turned out to be correct; Shahnawaz was killed six years later. But I think my father was on a quest for justice, not for power. So before Afghanistan, Libya and Damascus, he spent two years travelling the globe meeting human rights activists, presidents, publishing newspapers, books and organising law conferences. So his quest was really very different from Benazir’s; his quest was to get justice in the murder of his father, to get clemency in the case of his father. Not to sort of take hostage a political legacy. So had he stayed, his quest would’ve been different from his sister’s.

But don’t you think that had he stayed in Pakistan, his task would’ve been made easier?

Not under Zia because, as you know, the patriarchal societies that we live in, the son would’ve been assumed to be the political heir of his father. So would Shahnawaz have lived had he stayed back in Pakistan? I don’t know because this was an environment where you had journalists flogged in public. And not only that, the family of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto never saw his dead body. The Army claims that he was hanged but there is no proof of that. So I think that Murtaza and Shahnawaz’s fate wouldn’t have been very different from their father’s.

You call this book a search for justice; what is the next step in this search? How do you see this search going forward?

This is not the first attempt; we’ve been fighting for justice for 14 years and it has consistently been denied to us in the courts. Of course, we understand the courts in Pakistan are not always free especially in these last few years. They’ve been heavily influenced and heavily hijacked. For me, justice is not revenge because that means violence and that I’m not interested in. Justice is about memory. To be here and talking to you, it took 14 years to reach this point. For me, justice means that there is a remembering of these men who were killed and not just in my family, but the 3000 people who were killed. That this never happens again; that we are never faced with a government that kills 3000 people in a period of one year. So it’s a long road ahead.

Is there any hope for justice?

There is always hope for justice

Even with President Zardari at the helm of affairs?

President Zardari will come and go but the truth and justice are much stronger than his corruption of his government, of any government. If people say that they believe in truth and justice, then there is no force stronger than this belief.

Fatima Bhutto image courtesy: The Daily Beast

Songs of Blood and Sword image courtesy: Amazon

Sneak Peek: Quarantine by Rahul Mehta

The good folks at Random House India recently sent me a sample copy of their forthcoming book, Quarantine, by Rahul Mehta. It's a collection of short stories about gay relationships and the manner in which Indian families deal with them.  What struck me the most about Rahul's stories is the simplicity of his prose; crisp sentences, simple words and well-constructed paragraphs which make his stories beautiful and tender. Just to give you a brief insight, in Quarantine we see Bapuji, a typical grandfather who cribs about his daughter-in-law Asha's cooking and is unable to come to terms with his grandson being gay while in  Ten Thousand Years, we read about a couple whose relationship is on the rocks because one of the partners, Thomas, has been unfaithful.  There's a third story, Citizen, which I'm yet to read but I'm sure it'll be as enjoyable as the previous two.


I don't want to say too much right now because I've just read two stories but it's suffice to say that I really enjoyed whatever I read and am looking forward to reading the full book once it's out at the end of April. 


Will post a review/author interview if, as and when it happens.

Aatish Taseer on 'TheTemplegoers'

As some readers of this blog might recall, a few months ago I had blogged about Aatish Taseer's debut novel The Templegoers as being one of the most anticipated books of 2010. I'm quite pleased to inform you that the wait for the book was absolutely worth it; Templegoers  is one of the most stunning books I've read in recent months. And although the story is set in contemporary Delhi, it really echoes the contradictions that urban India and its residents are afflicted with. I won't divulge much about the novel for I don't intend to ruin your reading experience; instead here's an email interview I did with it's talented author Aatish Taseer.

 1) Apart from Delhi, you've lived in London, America and in a boarding school in southern India. Did your stay and experiences in these different places ever obliterate your Delhi years? Or did they make you think of the city from a different perspective?

No, they intensified my memories of Delhi. And I suppose living in those other places, feeling in some ways cold to the things that in India would have been my inspiration, made me realize where my real material and subjects lay. But it would be churlish of me to ignore the fact that I had lived with a kind of blindness in Delhi—on a basic level, to dirt, poverty, to human relations, in which there was often an element of casual violence; on other levels, to culture, language, and aspects of high civilization that had been all around me in India as I grew up, but that I had not had any means to assess or regard. Living in the West did not give me those means, but watching them regard not only their own civilization but that of other places as well, forced me to look at my own place in new ways; Delhi, and India too.

2) What would you attribute the political undercurrents in The Templegoers too? Your education, your brief career as a journalist, your parentage or your mother's own career as a political journalist?

A question like this from someone living in India surprises me. India is full of politics. You can’t take a pee in India, without the wall your peeing against being festooned in political slogans. Every lunching lady, taxi driver, gym trainer and heiress has a political opinion, especially in Delhi. As for The Temple-goers, it is less concerned with politics than with the question of what an Indian regeneration is to mean? Is it going to be some bland dystopia growing from a third-rate borrowed culture? Amazing Thailand so Incredible India? Or is it going to be a thing of substance? Is it going to produce an architect in Orissa who might one day build a modern legislative assembly in Bhubaneshwar, taking, for instance, as his model the marvelous shape of the notched amalka that towers over all its temples? Might we have modern apartment buildings that have a shade of our medieval river-fronts? Could it mean that India might lead the world in Indic scholarship? Might it produce institutes of Classical studies equal to our IITs? Will it lead to new ideas about our history? Will we start to create an environment that is more welcoming of the man coming up? Or will he continually be forced to shed his attachments to his language, dress, religion and customs in order to be acceptable to our shabby modern culture? These are not frills; they are the life-blood of any rising power that is to be more than tyranny. And for India to have a new and deeper sense of her past is essential, especially the Sanskritic past, which extends our cultural reach deep into Asia. So far it is not clear what the new energy that has entered India will amount to. But what is clear is that if we go quietly, the way of malls and blue glass, with all the shoddiness and imitation implicit in taking such a road, this ‘Indian renaissance’ would be a very disappointing thing.

3) The standard question one usually asks fiction writers is 'how much of the protagonist is the writer' but, in this case, I'd like to ask how much of the protagonist-narrator is NOT Aatish Taseer considering you've given him your name and set parts of the story near your residence? Also, did you lend him your name so that it enables the reader to put a face to it?

The narrator of The Temple-goers, for all his superficial resemblance to me, is a fictional character with little basis in reality. That he carries the name of ‘Aatish Taseer’ is part of a theme of blurred authorship that runs right through the book. But I don’t wish to give too much away.

4) It seems that one of your characters, Aakash, is a slight contradiction to today's world where some people, after gaining material wealth, have distanced themselves from being religious. Did you deliberately keep Aakash religious and was it attempt on your part to make a statement?

This is plain nonsense. Do a little experiment and find out where the majority of funding for religious organizations and our richer temples comes from and you will know that gaining material wealth in India has nothing to do with losing one’s religious feeling. What you’re talking about is a breed of deracinated Indian of English education, who has lost more than his religion; he has usually lost his language and culture too. That person, though certainly powerful, still constitutes a tiny minority. In any event, none of this concerns Aakash as he is neither rich nor yet rootless.

5) Aakash is a character which has many shades and layers and I get the impression that it must've taken you a long time to create him. Is that so? And if it is, do describe what the process was like?

This is hard to describe as most of it happens during the writing. But yes, Aakash had a sweeter, more vulnerable twin in an unpublished story I wrote, now three years ago. When I developed that character for the novel, darker elements crept in. They had perhaps always been there.

6) Sanyogita, the writer's girlfriend, seems to be a slightly passive element in his life; in the sense that she doesn't express very strong feelings at crucial points. Was it easy for you to keep Sanyogita at a periphery given that you have also been in a relationship in the past?

She is not a passive character. She looms over the story. And her silences, her withdrawal, are always there in background. She is the natural recipient of our sympathies. But yes, the narrator’s rejection of her is like the rejection of his world in Delhi. And once again, my having had a relationship (or two) has nothing to do with the novel’s narrator!

7) How easy or difficult did you find the task of incorporating real-life incidents such as bomb blasts and murder cases into a work of fiction? 

Yes, but in the novel, they are not really the bomb blasts or the murders themselves; they are their reproduction in the media. From the outset, it is that that the book is concerned with. So the murder in a sense is of absolutely no importance. It is why Megha seems not so much to die as to disappear.

8) A recent trend that has been noticed in contemporary fiction writing - at least in India - is the caricaturisation (for want of a better word) of real-life characters. Why is this so? As a writer, does caricaturisation make it easier/difficult for you to construct your characters?

I don’t really understand this question. Do you mean the emergence of a kind of novel, usually a set of short stories, that feels like it has been commissioned in London or New York by a woman with bleached blonde hair and an upper-west side accent, who says, ‘Yes, let’s have those gay NRI short stories from Mum-BAI.’ Or: ‘We could use a Vietnamese immigrant on our list. Let’s send it through the creative writing school machine and publish next spring’? I think I know what you mean. I despise that kind of fiction. It is the elevator music of literature. And we, in India, who need real writing, cannot afford that voiceless drivel.

9) Just like in your last book, Stranger To History, your debut novel has a very strong element of religion in it. What is it about religion that you make it such an integral part of your work? And will this feature in your future books as well?

I’m interested in religion only when it enters areas beyond faith. In the case of Hindusim, I’m drawn to it for the ways in which it makes sacred the topography of India. I think it gives many Indians their deepest idea of India, the land. And if not misused, it is a very gentle, beautiful idea, neither sectarian nor nationalistic, but actually built into a love for the natural world, for the contours of this country. It is a very easy idea to possess, and I think many Indians carry it in their heads effortlessly. One has only to turn to the epics to see what an incredible celebration they are of the landscape and seasons of India. Just the number of trees named and identified is enough to make one’s heart jump up. And so, you see, when one strays so far out of the sphere of faith, it becomes very difficult to answer your question in terms of ‘religion.’ I think it is important in India to make an intellectual shift, by which we are able to see our works of scripture as also works of literature; Sanskrit, as not merely a liturgical language, but also a literary one; and our temples, as not just places of worship, but as objects of beauty. That is real secularism, not the bogus government variety.

10) Will there always be an element of autobiography in your books? Will you ever be able to detach the Aatish Taseer from a work of fiction or will you always be present in some form?

No autobiography here, Aayush. That narrator is not me. And there have been many like him in the past, ‘Marcel’ of In Search of Lost Time and ‘Manto saab’ to name only a few. 

11) Lastly, The Templegoers comes nearly a year after your first book Stranger To History  was released. How would you describe your journey from Stranger to Templegoers over the past year? 

Quiet. The only life-altering addition has been Sanskrit, with its exquisite grammar and razor-thin views into the classical world of India.

(A shortened version of this appears in the Business Standard. Also, an earlier interview with Aatish is here)